Never let your child cry himself to sleep

One day, my senior sister called me early in the morning: \”Is my Maomao going crazy?\” I quickly asked what was wrong. It turned out that the mother-in-law had a quarrel late at night because of a trivial matter. Mom couldn\’t hold it back and yelled at Maomao. The child kept crying. Mom was also angry, so she ignored her. Maomao cried herself to sleep, but woke up within an hour, shouting at the top of her lungs that she had a nightmare. When she fell asleep again, her mother quietly took a look. Maomao\’s body was shaking and her teeth were chattering. The mother was so frightened that she kept the child awake most of the night. Seeing that she was sleeping peacefully, I felt a little relieved. The senior sister said with emotion: Poor parents all over the world. Raising a child goes through all kinds of hardships. After preventing natural disasters, you also have to prevent your own \”man-made disasters\”. Indeed, yelling at your child before going to bed and making your child fall asleep with tears in his eyes will have an impact on the child\’s body and mind. Under intense stimulation, children cannot sleep well, are easily awakened, have nightmares, and their minds will be clouded. I have a reporter friend who interviewed a mountain village. There is a popular educational method called \”beating the sleeping tiger\”. The child got into trouble during the day, such as stealing a neighbor\’s plums. He was very worried and thought he might be beaten. But after waiting for a day, my parents looked happy. The child was very happy, thinking that he had escaped disaster. At night, the child rests his little arms and sleeps peacefully on the bed. When he was half asleep and hazy, the father rushed in, picked up the child, and punched and kicked him. In the storm, the child burst into tears. Dad finished the beating and walked away. The child huddled under the quilt, cried until he was tired, and fell asleep silently. This is \”sleeping tiger\”. The villagers were very proud and said that this way the children could remember. As they hoped, the children in this village were very well-behaved. However, the stupidity rate in the whole village is much higher than the normal value. They don\’t know that before going to bed is a very special time. Beating and scolding children at this time is very cruel to children. Children\’s memories are particularly deep before bed. Scientists have done experiments and found that memory peaks before going to bed at night. Receive new stimuli and go to bed immediately within 30 minutes to remember them best, because sleep slows down forgetting. Children will remember it well if they are spanked before going to bed. After falling asleep, this scene remained in his mind, or turned into a dream, which continued to frighten him. A child\’s mind is particularly tender before going to bed. All mothers know that children are weaker than usual when they are going to bed, tired, or sick. A newly weaned child has a lot of fun during the day, but at night he has to fuss about feeding because his attachment to his mother seems to have returned to when he was younger. Psychologists also believe that the time before bedtime is more like a \”transitional space\”, where children slowly retreat from the real world to the spiritual world. If you yell at the child at this time, the attack effect will be doubled. Because the child has taken off the outer shell and is quieter, more attached, and more like the weak original. A child\’s mood is set before bed. Sleep is the end of the day. The child\’s emotions solidify before going to bed. When a child is beaten and scolded, the main expression is crying. Crying consumes energy, especially at night. Children will soon get tired of crying and fall asleep involuntarily. This means that the child’s feelings of grievance, fear, and anger have no time to process and are all accumulated in the heart. The harm caused by accumulated emotions to children is invisible but far-reaching. Adults have a deep understanding that if you never forget something, there will be repercussions. unfinished business,What you don\’t get will become an obsession. The same goes for emotions that have not been dealt with, always entangled in the deepest part of the soul. Someone on Zhihu asked about childhood shadows, and one highly praised answer described himself this way: When I had hot pot at a class reunion a few days ago, I accidentally knocked over a plate of blinds. I suddenly turned blue with fright and stood there, not daring to move. I don\’t know why it happened, but at that moment I suddenly lost all ability to react. I stayed there as if waiting for something, not daring to move. When she was a child, her mother would beat and scold her severely for the smallest thing. The girl had a lot of anger and fear in her heart, but she felt sorry for her mother because it was too hard. I can\’t express my emotions, they are all tangled up in my heart. She has grown up, and when she accidentally hits a plate, fear instantly takes over her. This is because the unexpressed fear has been lingering in her heart and never left, so it will pop up from time to time. Freud said a very sad thing: The script of our lives has been written as early as childhood. If we are not aware of it, the rest of our lives will be just compulsive repetition. When a child falls asleep due to crying, the impact on his soul may not really emerge until many years later. Parents originally hoped that their children would fall asleep in a sweet mood like Angel. Just like the lullaby sings: The moon is bright, the wind is quiet, the cradle is gently swinging, and the baby is smiling slightly in his sleep. But why can\’t we help crying our children in the middle of the night? Sometimes the schedule is too full and the kids are too slow. We are busy and so are the kids. Especially after school, the evening is full: homework, memorizing words, doing Mathematical Olympiad, reading, exercising, playing piano, drinking milk… watching the hands of the clock point to 10 o\’clock and 11 o\’clock little by little, the child still can\’t figure out the opposite number. Relationship, my mother is easily impatient. When I get impatient, I can\’t help but want to yell at my child. Sometimes, children are too playful and refuse to sleep. When it was time to go to bed, the children were still playing Lego, watching pads, and eating snacks. The tired old mother tried her best to no avail, so she had no choice but to start the \”Hedong Lion\’s Roar\”. Sometimes, parents find it difficult to resist their children\’s bedtime requests. For example, they let mom and dad sleep with them, tell each story one more time, don\’t turn off the lights when sleeping, refuse to wear long-sleeved pajamas in winter, and make trouble to sleep with the air conditioner before summer… The two sides are at loggerheads and feel deeply frustrated. The parents became angry and scolded the children. Sometimes, it is us who are in a bad mood and blame our children. Being a parent is hard work. In addition to being parents, we also have other things to worry about, including work, life, housework, friends, and many emotions that we bring to our homes. If the child throws a fuse at random, we will turn into the Hulk: \”Don\’t make me angry, you won\’t like my angry look!\” If the child doesn\’t wink, our outburst of anger will be under the banner of justice in disciplining the child. , rushed out, scolding the child until he was dejected. After the scolding, we were happy, but the child was miserable. The deepest desire of parents is just to cherish each other with their children. The original intention of getting angry and yelling at the child is to hope that the child can sleep more. But our behavior of yelling at our children until they cry is firmly on the opposite side of our original intentions and deeply hurts our children. Parent-child relationship expert Jimmy Lesser writes in Raising Children You Can Tolerate” wrote: There are no winners in the war of interpersonal relationships, only more and more victims. Yes, there is no winner when you yell at your kids before bed. The child fell asleep with tears in his eyes, keeping the pain in his heart. We also feel uncomfortable, either feeling guilty and regretful, or still immersed in anger. So what do we do? In fact, the most important thing is to handle two emotions well. We must understand our children\’s emotions. When our children procrastinate and refuse to sleep and make \”strange demands\”, we should not act as if they are controlled by a remote control and start to get angry all of a sudden. First listen to your child’s thoughts. For example, if a child asks to turn on the light to sleep, maybe he is afraid of the dark, maybe he has encountered something scary recently, maybe he is just having a tantrum, and you will know after hearing this. After listening, we can refuse the child\’s request, but we must understand his emotions. For example, you can hug the child who can\’t hear enough stories and say, \”I know you want to hear a few more stories, but it\’s time to go to bed now.\” We need to take care of our own emotions. When we are angry, we need to express it in a safe way. You can\’t just rely on getting angry and suppressing. Getting angry hurts your children, and suppressing yourself hurts. The best way is to describe your emotions in words. For example, you can say, \”Mom felt very sad when you yelled just now.\” \”You can\’t go to bed so late. Mom is worried about your health.\” We can also temporarily stop communicating with the child and go to another room to calm down for a while. If we still fail to control the prehistoric power and hurt the child, the bottom line is that we cannot let the child cry alone until he falls asleep. We need to guide the child to express his emotions: \”I was angry at you just now. Are you feeling wronged and a little scared?\” and then sincerely apologize to him. Only when negative emotions are fully seen and dealt with can they be resolved. Harvard\’s Happiness Class says: Only by falling asleep with a sweet mood can we learn to be grateful. Say \”Good night, I love you\” to your child before going to bed and teach him to be grateful for every day of his life. You know, how we spend our day is how we spend our life.